


gravekeeper’s touch

by joeri



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Coming Untouched, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route Spoilers, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Lowercase, M/M, Scar Kissing, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-19 20:14:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20663129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joeri/pseuds/joeri
Summary: felix isn’t like the king; he buries his dead.he buries them in his body and he houses them for centuries.





	gravekeeper’s touch

**Author's Note:**

> mind the tags. also if youre squicked out by vomit, felix throws up in this.

rodrigue is dead so felix is smoking. the cloves belonged to him, tucked into a little cherrywood box painted black. might as well use them.

rodrigue is dead and felix can’t feel an emotion richer than the speckled bittersweet disinterest he’s had in his father his whole life through. felix can’t focus on much else but the taste of spice and ash in his throat and the branches of lightning wrapping like ribbon ‘round his arm.

rodrigue is dead and so is glenn.

manuela had come out to the bridge tonight in an attempt to tend to the wound with a vulnerary. she brought an elixir too. felix sent her packing the moment she tried to put her hands on him—too soft and silky. the touch of her flesh burned. it made his ghost leap up his throat. he swallows it back down with the smoke. it makes a messy thing of his head.

stretching his arm out in front of him, felix ogles the veiny scar tissue and how it changes color in the light, something like iridescent vines turning purple and pushing out from under the topmost layer of skin. he resets his shoulder and it _stings_ for no fucking reason.

his teeth gnaw at the blunt.

none of this has a reason. this war is senseless and for five years of his life he’s been fighting to find enjoyment out of it. it serves as a focal point. in all of his wildest dreams, he’s a warrior who fights until he’s forgotten how to stand, how to swing and how to parry. in reality, it’s scarcely a similar experience. it isn’t fun anymore. had he wanted it to be?

lowering his head to gape down at the valley below him, felix flicks his smoke. the ashes disintegrate.

his legs are dangling over the bridge but there’s nothing suicidal about the gesture to him. felix has no desire to get himself killed.

he just thinks that if someone pushed him, maybe he deserves to have to fight against that.

rodrigue and glenn fought. felix just wants to know if he’s strong, lucky, or being punished.

felix crosses his legs and rocks his body backwards, delighting for once in the chilly gust felt atop the monastery bridge. it cards through his hair and prickles the sensitive skin of his shoulder. it hurts and hurts and he nods. _good._

it should, after all.

…

“kinda cold out tonight, isn’t it?” prompts sylvain, flanking felix’s right as he takes a puff of his own.

“you didn’t come out here to talk about the weather, so what do you want?”

unnecessarily brusque of him, probably. felix wouldn’t know, sylvain is chuckling under his breath anyways. he hands felix’s the smoke back and felix frowns at how moist and lippy the blunt is now. he lets it air dry with two fingers, lodging the roll up between them.

sylvain doesn’t answer honestly. “nothin’ just… enjoying the view. today was awful rough—”

“you don’t even care enough to make your complete bullshit sound convincing. that’s what’s pissing me off.”

scowling, deciding _fuck it_, felix tosses his blunt into the abyss below. he doesn’t even like smoking. he’s never smoked in his life. what is he trying to do now? remodel his entire self after his ignorant father too in a bid to keep him alive?

felix isn’t like the king; he buries his dead.

he buries them in his body and he houses them for centuries.

“felix,” whispers sylvain, “you’re kinda scaring everyone.”

it must be his proximity to the edge. felix snorts, twists up his eyes and uncrosses his legs, both hands holding firm to the bridge beneath him. the burnt one quivers, muscle aching beneath the spider-web crawl of purple scar stringing through his flesh.

“i just needed a rush of blood.”

felix learned early there’s much lazier ways to get adrenaline.

twisting his hips, felix yanks both legs around to the safe side. the rush surges inside the discs of his spine as his head hangs lethargically behind. he does not, of course, fall backwards though. he does not let his body careen like a stone into the valley, despite the vivid pictures in his head of what the descent should look like. standing upright, two feet on the pavement, he snarls fanglessly back at sylvain. he strives so hard to express such disgust, having forgotten to actually follow through with the feeling.

“don’t look at me like that.”

_like you’re pitying me, save that for your corpse king._

sylvain moves to pluck up felix’s arm only for felix to flinch in pain—pain before the motion’s even complete. he falls to the side, against the bridge. he averts his eyes.

“felix—?”

“just leave me alone,” he says, marching with a harried purpose to the dorms, the skin around his fists pulled tight, his gums ashiver with grit.

_don’t touch me._

… 

it shouldn’t matter to felix that dimitri’s more torn up over the loss of his father than he is. everyone processes grief differently. what _does_ register as a wound he can’t touch, can’t clean or bandage is the knowledge that he’d left this world with one boy on his mind: the young prince he’d raised for lambert.

gut frothing over in rage, felix can feel his jaw unhinge as his body collapses in worship of this disturbing ache. he convulses with the shock. he judders and stutters and coughs up every pile of dirt he’s swallowed all these years—busy imbibing the earth where glenn’s body once laid.

it’s not fair. _it’s not fair._

everything glenn sought to be, every bit of the swordsman, every ounce of the son that he’d been, felix could not find himself in the narrative and so he would die this way, as if he’d never existed.

as if felix had died too so many years ago.

_it’s not fucking fair._

what gave that boar the right to complain, to scream and slaughter and rend to the bone all who stood in his way? rodrigue kept his eyes careful, hawkish over his every move. how perfect, that the rat king should be rewarded for his insanity and felix would be chastised for his restraint.

as if felix didn’t want to fall apart.

as if he hadn’t been hoping for _years_ that rodrigue would change.

_“i’m proud of glenn. he gave his life to protect prince dimitri.”_

who fucking decided glenn’s life was less important?

the second son, an heir apparent by death and not his own blood—glenn’s blood: felix wipes his mouth, the gooseflesh sprinkling through the deadened nerves of his left arm throbbing with agony.

the bucket reeks. losing his mind outside the horse stables wasn’t his idea of a good time. every night now he stalks the halls of garreg mach, clearing his head as well as he can, exhausting himself to induce sleep.

sparring would do the trick but no one’s up to just fight and not ask pitying questions. just point a blade at him. just… _someone_ please, hurt him.

thankfully no one in the daylight hours saw anything different from the fraldarius soldier. felix saw hope in dimitri. it was the one boon from the death of that fucker. felix kept a strict focus on his swordplay and kept to himself, no different than usual.

only maybe, sylvain could tell something ate at him.

tonight especially.

the routine ghostlike steps of sylvain come echoing out from behind him and felix can almost pretend that he was not followed here and watched from a distance if he recalls the other man’s love of horses.

they love unconditionally, sylvain had said. felix wishes those words didn’t haunt him now of all times.

“felix,” says sylvain so fondly it _hurts_, kneeling down so close and near to him that felix doubles over in sickness again.

sylvain’s palms are in his hair and felix’s wrists are rattling the bucket. nothing’s even coming up. he heaves and heaves and _wishes_ something else would come out, that he’d have something more to show for this. no tears will come. at the end of his feelings are nothing but bile and acid and a panic attack he wasn’t aware he was having.

the hands on him pull him open, yank his ribs apart and touch parts of him he’d stopped believing were real. sylvain cradles him as felix flops backwards and his fingers prod and poke into his own eyes, his cheekbones, desperate to feel real.

nothing’s real. nothing’s right.

“s-stop, stop, i _can’t._”

“how can i help?” sylvain says.

_i don’t know._

felix does not know how to mourn a man he abhors, how to reconcile the loss of a vital part of him without grieving for the conversations left abandoned.

_i hate you. i hate you so much. i hate you so fucking much and you’re indifferent. you’re indifferent and dead._

the touch of someone else’s skin on his has felix swaying, reeling inside to a part of himself long neglected, unexplored and tingling with sensitivity. sylvain’s got one arm around his neck, the other pillowing felix’s ribs.

it’s been five years and when’s the last time felix had been encircled like this?

“i wish i…”

fuck, as soon as felix tries to talk, his chest squeezes, his lungs jump, he makes a sob and he makes a fucking fool of himself.

“breathe, just breathe for me, it’s okay.”

it shouldn’t be this hard, felix thinks with his words hiccuping inaudibly. his mouth tastes salt and it’s not until then that he can tell he’s crying.

sickening.

“i wish i didn’t feel.” _any of this._

it’d be glorious to be as unaffected as he feigns, as far off and distant as his mask would have others believe. felix has never been able to make anyone think that he’s heartless at all, but this is where he wins.

because for a time he’d even convinced himself that he couldn’t give a shit less about the life of his father.

it’s a slap in the face to find that he does.

“shhhh,” shushes sylvain, his hands roaming safely across the expanse of felix’s form, embracing him until his muscles go rigid with the press. “you’re allowed to.”

_but, i don’t want to._

nudging his nose into the clammy flesh of felix’s shoulder, sylvain plants a pacifying kiss into the lacy, blue scar tissue and felix’s muscles spasm at the touch. oh, it’s… it’s _scary._

coughing up a buoyant sound, the kind that blows up suddenly and balloons out of your chest, felix writhes into the pleasant touch. it soothes and it makes felix _suffer_ and he tilts his head in hopes that he’ll continue. his hands reach back to find sylvain’s knees, clenching on for dear life.

he’s muttering something sublime but unintelligible into felix’s skin, caressing his lips down the thread of scars goring felix’s arm, lifting it up and back to him. felix gasps, his teeth shivering, swallowing up pink puffy lips and warm salt. he trembles at the feather-gentle touch.

sylvain’s mouth travels like a warm cloud, decorating the indecent marks with love and terror. felix chokes on the memory.

_felix screams through the storm. his thigh-high boots sink through the mud. felix launches a premature blast through his fingers. felix misjudges the aim, the timing, the energy—a flashbang of thoron ripples up from his anahat and shreds his left arm to black bits._

_his father dies._

the mortal savant sags his frame into sylvain, all but surrendering himself to the sensation, to the experience. sylvain’s tongue kneads into the scar. he leaves a shallow suck, not the type that leaves hickies—the type that makes felix moan and rut his hips up.

_please, don’t stop touching me._

sylvain pins his lips to the side of felix’s neck and felix runs his hands up and down the length of sylvain’s thighs behind him. felix’s fingernails itch and tear at the fabric in his knees. his breath puffs in and out of him quick. speaking slow, sylvain smooths his mouth up and around the conch of felix’s ear, saying, “have you gotten this treated?”

and for a moment, felix can’t decipher what that means until sylvain’s nuzzling his nose into his shoulder again. he goes light-headed and dim.

“no.”

“c’mon, let’s get you up—”

“_no_,” felix pleads and he can’t see what face sylvain makes in response, which is fine because sylvain can’t see _his_ either. “i want to stay here.”

it’s the best way he can convey what he means. he swallows hard.

_please, don’t stop touching me._

shifting onto his ass behind felix, sliding felix between his legs and hugging him tight, sylvain says, “how can i help?”

felix’s mouth hangs ajar. “this.”

“this?”

experimentally, or perhaps very deliberately, _teasingly_, sylvain kisses felix’s shoulder blade.

“this?” he parrots.

arching up into the graze of skin against skin, felix’s eyebrows curl up and his usually flinty face distorts up into something desperate and wanton.

“that, _that_—”

“i’ve got you,” and sylvain’s leaving a litter of little red-lipped blemishes all across felix’s neck, stretching on into his shoulder and felix whimpers without warning.

_please._

fingertips sneaking and sliding under the hem of felix’s shirt, sylvain explores mark after mark. his digits rub circles into every scar adorning felix’s chest. sylvain’s thumbs flick across a pair of nipples, taut and pinched up. felix sighs and pants and forgets how to be a person as sylvain merely shuttles his hands over every patch of felix’s battle-worn flesh. felix’s eyes clog, spill over with water. sylvain groans into felix’s hair.

“you can let it all out.”

so he does. felix whines out something humiliating, his body wrenching up as the over-stimulation wrecks him whole. his throat goes hoarse with the cry. his body wears itself out. his high crashes back to the earth. the pleasure is quickly replaced by guilt. the sensation becomes unbearable, and sylvain’s still holding him through it.

felix covers his mouth with a snivel.

“it hurts,” he says.

sylvain maneuvers his arms to wrap around him once more, merciful enough to let felix recover.

“i know,” sylvain utters, voice cracking too.

**Author's Note:**

> im always anxious and worried abt 'woobifying' characters but like. if i wanna write one thing where felix gets to cry and mourn and get kissed and touched, its my damn prerogative.


End file.
